New player needs some Help

Words - do not put all your eggs in one basket.

         - Colonize when you can.

         - Have a strong manufacturing base with more then one shipyard.

there are tutorials on the GC site and in steam. if you want you could also look at videos.

dev streams https://www.youtube.com/user/stardockgames and Macsen lets play https://www.youtube.com/user/MacsenGaming/videos

If you want an exploit to really kick their ass, here it is in one word.... 'escort'

The reason... the AI will target any escort class ship first in battle.

So all you need to do is have one escort class ship with minimal weapons but lots of defense. All your other ships, even tiny ones, set to 'capital'.

Gentlemen ( or Ladies ) ... Thx for the info, started a new game and will build in some more shipyards and spread out my infrastructure. When I get to the Battle phase will try the " Escort / Capital " ship classification to see if that helps. Would rather beat the game without that but we will see. I realize it depends on the difficulty, who your playing ect but as a general rule at what turns should the "War" phase begin, I am not sure how much infrastructure is enough and when to switch to ship building.

Thx Again ...

Breg

When to switch to war economy is going to vary a lot with how big you seem compared to others and a lot of other variables.  It is going to vary according to your map choices and playstyle.  Therefore, it is difficult to give you a pre-planned schedule.  I suggest playing a couple games with a deliberately weak military build up.   Take note of when the enemy factions start getting noticeably belligerent and threatening.  You should be able to notice their tone changing and getting more aggressive.  Then they will declare war.  That is when you take careful note of the turn number.  That is a key data point.  After a couple of games, you should get a good feel of where that number lies.  Start thinking about how many turns it takes you to research military techs and actually start building war ships.  That gives you an idea of lead time needed.  If you put together those two pieces of information, you should get a good idea of what your personal basic strategy schedule is.  "I should start now or it may be too late."  It is no guarantee.  The AI does things on different schedules in different games and you will have to adjust, but it should give you a good start on keeping ahead of those villainous monsters out there.

Really Mystikmind?

Don't classes like Assault will shoot at anything nearby until it's preferred target is in range and start its focusfire on capitals, etc, no?

I generally have a mix of attack/defense with preference towards defense on my escorts because I want my capitals to live longer. Like, three defense modules to two attack modules.

One thing that is a huge problem with the Iconians, is that their ships repair in combat.  This makes fighting them very difficult.  The tech required to do so (versus for other factions) is incredibly low on the tech tree, and doesn't require ship modules (modules that are added actually are far less effective).

I actually started to prefer playing custom-races with the Iconian tech tree just for this bonus, which combined with combat attributes (hit points and jamming) becomes incredibly effective.

What you say should be the case... there should be some AI ships that target capital ships over escorts, but i have never seen it happen.

You can have an attack rating of 1 on an escort and everything else defense and still the AI will target it first and ignore the capitals.

The only time i use assault ships is when the AI has more firepower than my escorts can withstand, and then the assault ships take some of the heat off the escorts..... assault ships from carrier modules are the best since you never have to replace the ones that get destroyed in battle!

Escort is not always first, but it is always before capital and support, these are charted out for convenient study in the wiki.

http://galciv3.gamepedia.com/Ship_roles#Ship_roles

As it shows, escorts also start closer to the enemy than capitals.

My post in this thread should be helpful to you, if you're losing on easy, you're probably suffering from many of the same problems I documented in the guy's save file.  The game is a bit counter intuitive when it comes to planet bonuses, and there seems to be a tendency to try and maximize them in a way that utterly cripples the maximum output of a planet.

Gentlemen ( & Ladies )

Sorry not to get back to you all earlier but I have been playing my @#$% off and trying to learn the Game as best I can. After the advice given here by all I have managed to win several games and can stay ahead of the AI on medium star systems. I am using star bases to enhance my better worlds and use the Culture Press to take back anything that the Ai takes that i wanted. I have been treating the colonization phase like a race and tweek my Production loadings to help push out a Colony ship every 2 turns. I usually end up with 15 to 20 planets and the AI is at 7 to 10 max.

I still have a lot to learn about ship design , Battles and how to win a " Crush All who Oppose Me " : ) type victory but I am getting there. Psychoak ... I read your review of the other players save file and picked up a few tips I am doing wrong. A question ... as you raise the difficulty and the AI gets more aggressive do the basic Planet development rules still apply or do you get to a point where you have to make changes in the way you develop your planets & ships.

Love this game, It makes you think and not just pull the Pew Pew trigger ..

Thanks to all who have posted and helped me over the Hump.

Bregoss

You don't actually need to do such things to be even with the AI at normal, it doesn't do them itself to any significant degree, so matching their non cheating performance isn't nearly that difficult.  It's at higher levels that really taking care to maximize each planet becomes more and more important.  Fine tuning the pop/production percentages to maximize your raw to output conversion will be quite a bit of math, but unless you plan on playing against super cheat crazy AI, all you'll really need to do is pop out a few farms and spam a single type of production for each planet.  Just know that it's possible to have crazy powerful planets that pop out huge hull dreadnoughts in a couple turns with the right building combinations on the right high end planets.